Friday, October 10, 2008

Just ruminatin'

Where does it go from here? Wall Street had the one of its worst weeks ever. Berlusconi, ever the peacock, muttered something about closing all of the financial markets so the leaders could sit down and figure things out. (He then retracted those statements. I guess that trial balloon exploded.)

It's pretty bad. And it will more likely get worse. Do you know that after the DOW fell in 1929, it was nearly 25 years before the market reached its pre-crash levels? So, "how low can it go" is nothing compared to "how long can it stay there."

It's safe to assume that the governments are going to seize this opportunity to gather even more power over the people. The more frightened and hungry people are, the easier they are to control, donchya' know.

2 Comments:

The comment about 25 years to reach "pre-crash" levels is technically true, but the "pre-cash" level you are talking about was a sharp brief peak, which is not really the best point of comparison. Your statement is true for someone who put all of their money in the stock market in September 1929, but not true for someone, who as all convention wisdom advises, gradually put their money into the stock market a little at a time over a consistent time period (dollar cost averaging -- the way pension funds invest, too). Thus, someone who began investing in the early 1920's and continued through the next decade would have starting seeing positive territory again for their investments in the mid-1930's (despite another sharp drop in the early 1930's).

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